Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program.

For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.

"Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been," said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We're not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it's clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations.

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) must clear up "a string of open questions" about user data stored by its iPhone, iPad, and other devices, a spokesman for Germany's consumer protection ministry said on Thursday.

The call follows a similar request made by U.S. Senator Al Franken on Wednesday, which cited a report by security researchers alleging the company's iOS4 operating system secretly compiled customers' location data in a hidden file.

"Apple must reveal where, for how long, and for what purpose the data is saved, who has access to it, and how it is protecting against unauthorised access," ministry spokesman Holger Eichele said.

The row over the privacy of mobile phone users escalated today as it was revealed that Google devices regularly transmit user locations back to the company.The new revelations come after Apple was this week slammed by several Congress members for the way user locations are being stored in unencrypted databases on the iPhone and iPad, sometimes stretching back several months.In Google's case an Android HTC phone tracked its location every few seconds and transmitted the data back to Google several times an hour, according to new research by security analyst Samy Kamkar for the Wall Street Journal.It also transmitted the name, location and signal strength of any close Wi-Fi networks and the phone's unique identifier.

The New Zealand government has surprised the public and even some MPs by moving to rush through its controversial 3 strikes-style legislation today. The new measures will allow for users to be disconnected from the Internet for up to 6 months, based on infringement claims from copyright holders.

Besides the fact the Governor of Michigan has become a dictator in taking elected officials rights he has now allowed unconstitutional grabs of all technology information off people's phones by the State Police during simple pull overs!

The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

...

A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

More than 3,200 oil and gas wells classified as active lie abandoned beneath the Gulf of Mexico, with no cement plugging to help prevent leaks that could threaten the same waters fouled by last year's BP spill, The Associated Press has learned.

These wells likely pose an even greater environmental threat than the 27,000 wells in the Gulf that have been plugged and classified officially as "permanently abandoned" or "temporarily abandoned." Those sealed wells were first tallied and reported as a major leaking threat in an investigative report by the AP in July.

Webmaster's Commentary:

And also notice that since the Gulf Oil Disaster, there has been absolutely no Federal regulations passed by our well-and-truly-bought Congress to forestall another such disaster.

"Nothing has happened," said Jones, speaking by phone from his law office in Baton Rouge. "When oil was still gushing out of the Gulf, everybody wanted to do everything right, to do whatever they could to keep that from happening again. But that was then. Now, everybody is back to drilling more, making more money and not worrying about safety. That attitude is what cost the lives of 11 men and caused the biggest environmental disaster in our history," he said.

Webmaster's Commentary:

People are expendable to Congress members: the money from the oil companies which fund Congressional campaigns is not.

European plans to crack down hard on oil companies with a series of measures to prevent a spill in EU waters like that of BP's Gulf of Mexico disaster, are under attack from the UK and other national governments, the Guardian has learned.

The measures, backed by the EU's energy chief Günter Oettinger, require companies to use a higher standard of equipment, pay for damage for which they are not liable now, and prove they have enough funds to clear up after any accident, before they can be licensed to drill.

The chemicals were used by companies during a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into rock formations deep underground. The process, which is being used to tap into large reserves of natural gas around the country, opens fissures in the rock to stimulate the release of oil and gas.

Hydrofracking has attracted increased scrutiny from lawmakers and environmentalists in part because of fears that the chemicals used during the process can contaminate underground sources of drinking water.

Millions of gallons of potentially cancer-inducing chemicals have been pumped into the U.S. water supply by leading gas and oil companies, an investigation has revealed.

The chemicals were pumped into wells as part of a process called hydraulic fracturing to access natural gas, which needs large amounts of water and fluids injected underground at high volumes and pressure.

A report quizzed 14 different companies about the chemicals used in the process and found 29 chemicals were known or suspected human carcinogens.

One year after the BP oil spill, experts describe the the impact of the disaster on wildlife, the environment, and human health as “catastrophic”

April 20, 2011 marks the one-year anniversary of BP’s catastrophic oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. On this day in 2010 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, causing oil to gush from 5,000 feet below the surface into the ninth largest body of water on the planet.

At least 4.9 million barrels of BP’s oil would eventually be released into the Gulf of Mexico before the well was capped 87 days later.

The local doctor, Mike Robichaux, said he has seen as many as 60 patients like Simon in recent weeks, as this small southern town of 10,000 bordered by swamp land and sugar cane fields grapples with a mysterious sickness that some believe is all BP's fault.

Jamie Simon worked on a barge in the oily waters for six months following the BP spill last year, cooking for the cleanup workers, washing their clothes and tidying up after them.

One year later, the 32-year-old said she still suffers from a range of debilitating health problems, including racing heartbeat, vomiting, dizziness, ear infections, swollen throat, poor sight in one eye and memory loss.

She blames toxic elements in the crude oil and the dispersants sprayed to dissolve it after the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010.

Webmaster's Commentary:

To both PB and the Obama administration, these people are totally expendable. They will neither receive the compensation nor the real care they so desperately need.

Results from the studies -- two in New York and one in an agricultural community in California -- suggest prenatal exposure to pesticides can have a lasting effect on intelligence.

In one study, a team at the University of California Berkeley found that every tenfold increase in prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides corresponded with a 5.5 point drop in overall IQ scores in children by age 7.

The first essential to coping with MSG is understanding where MSG is hidden -- just in case you would like to avoid it, or would like to begin to understand how much MSG you are able to tolerate without having an obvious adverse reaction.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Please share this with everyone you care about who has an adverse reaction to MSG in food.

Fears have been reignited about the safety of energy saving light bulbs after a group of scientists warned that they contain cancer causing chemicals.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The Compact Fluorescent Bulb was invented by General Electric, the same company that designed the reactors now showering the northern hemisphere with nuclear debris. Then, because nobody wanted to spend a lot more money for a light bulb that was far more toxic (mercury and a radioisotope) than a tungsten bulb, and that never lasted anywhere near as long as claimed, General Electric actually lobbied the US Congress to pass a law making the bulbs mandatory!After getting the law, GE closed it's American tungsten light bulb factories and makes the Compact Fluorescent Bulb in China!

Those GE employees got lots of time to dance now!

But the light bulb law is clearly the main driver in closing this factory. After all, the product they make here will be contraband by 2014.

“That was the nail in the coffin,” Madigan says.

These men, waiting in the shade in front of the employees’ entrance to the plant on a hot afternoon, all know another pertinent fact about the light-bulb law that is killing their jobs: GE lobbied in favor of it.

Why did GE, founded by Thomas Edison, support a bill that killed the traditional incandescent light bulb?

The company said in 2007 it wanted to make sure it was working under a single federal efficiency standard, rather than a patchwork of state regulations. GE also touts its compact fluorescents as one of the green products in its “eco-magination” initiative.

The workers don’t buy the green arguments, pointing to the mercury gas that’s in the fluorescents. “It’s illegal to dump mercury in the river, but not in the landfill,” two of them say in unison—it’s become a dark joke at the factory.

Robert Pifer, who will also be laid off in July if he doesn’t find a new job by then, has an explanation for GE’s support of the light-bulb law and its shift to the more expensive fluorescents. “Are they not just trying to force-feed people stuff they don’t want to buy?”

So, GE gets environmentalist brownie points for selling “clean” light bulbs, and they also get to charge more for their bulbs. But there’s another advantage—they save on labor with fluorescents, because they make the fluorescents in China.

Not only are wages lower there, but so are the regulatory burdens, both environmental and labor. The Times of London recently reported, “Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs.”

(NaturalNews) Thanks to the Fukushima catastrophe, we've all been learning a lot about the laws of physics lately -- especially about radiation. To help explain it all, the folks over at InformationIsBeautiful.com have created a radiation explanation chart that shows the relative levels of harm from various doses of radiation (link below).

The InformationIsBeautiful website is pretty cool. The folks there specialize in making complex data visually interesting. I've admired some of their work for quite some time.

So I was checking out their new "Radiation Dosage Chart" which explained all the effects of receiving radiation doses of various levels. The chart revealed things like:

Cancer radiotherapy dose is fatal?

Okay, so wait a minute. A dose of 10,000 is fatal, yet the cancer industry uses twice that dose to "treat" cancer? I knew cancer radiation treatments were barbaric, but I never knew they were twice the amount considered absolutely fatal.

The next day, I went back to the InformationIsBeautiful.net website to make sure I really saw what I thought I saw. After all, if cancer radiotherapy is being given at 20,000 mSv, that's a pretty big story, especially in light of the Fukushima fallout and the increasing radiation burden on populations everywhere. So I brought up the website, and guess what?

The 20,000 mSv cancer radiotherapy line had been removed from the chart.

So how do you think this line about 20,000 mSv in cancer radiotherapy got removed? I suppose there are a number of possible explanations for it. One particularly conspiratorial explanation is that someone from the cancer industry probably asked them to remove it. The cancer industry, after all, doesn't want people knowing the simple truth that cancer radiotherapy involves a fatal dose of radiation. And no industry operates with more secrecy than the cancer industry, it seems, with all its cover-ups about the dangers of chemotherapy and its continued suppression of the truth about vitamin D and its cancer preventive effects.

Just to give these folks a chance to explain all this, I sent off an email to David at the InformationIsBeautiful website asking them to clarify why they pulled the cancer radiotherapy information off their radiation dosage chart. Perhaps there's a completely innocent explanation for it, I thought, and I want to know the real story here.

The email I received in return was a polite response with a collection of frequently asked questions and answers. I don't blame the guys there for using this -- they're probably incredibly busy these days -- but I was intrigued by one of the answers in the email itself: It said that the InformationIsBeautiful team has "done commercial work for GE, the BBC, Google and many others."

And who is GE? They are, of course, one of the world's top manufacturers of radiotherapy equipment!

So now we have the Information Is Beautiful team pulling the "cancer radiotherapy" line out of their chart, then admitting they are a paid client of General Electric, a top manufacturer of radiotherapy equipment.

None of this proves anything, of course, but it probably raises a few eyebrows. Is there a financial conflict of interest at work here? Personally, I like their website a lot, and I'm a fan of their charts. So I don't want to think they might be engaged in some sort of intentional censoring of their chart data just to protect the cancer industry. But I've seen stranger stuff happen, for sure...

Webmaster's Commentary:

I got to watch my mother wither away from cancer induced by the radioactive polonium from the fertilizer used to grow the tobacco in mass-produced cigarettes. The doctors treated her with more radiation, and I was never sure whether in the end she died of the cancer or the radiation therapy.

Men diagnosed with testicular cancer often choose to undergo regular computed tomography (CT) scans that monitor progress after treatment. But a new study published in the journal Cancer explains that these CT scans actually cause secondary cancers, and suggests that doctors consider this important fact before flippantly recommending it to their patients.

"This is the first study that I am aware of that shows that diagnostic CT scans cause cancer with statistical significance," said John Boone, coauthor of the study, professor in the University of California (UC) Davis Department of Radiology, and CT expert. "The organizations that recommend these protocols need to reevaluate this aggressive use of CT and maybe opt for MRI or ultrasound."

Conducted at UC Davis, the study evaluated the records of 7,301 men diagnosed between 1988 and 2006 with nonseminomatous germ cell tumors, which are the most common type that occur in testicular cancer patients. The team found that men who undergo the typical 15 CT scans in five years protocol after treatment are far more likely to get secondary cancers than men who opt for other forms of post-treatment monitoring.

"The side effect is worse than the disease," Chamie said, concerning CT scans. "More men are likely to get secondary malignancies than are liable to die from their active disease."

The study adds to the growing body of evidence concerning the very real dangers of CT scans and other forms of body imaging that involve the use of ionizing radiation. A 2010 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, warns about the very serious public health threat posed by the overuse of CT scans (http://www.naturalnews.com/030345_C...). And an earlier 2010 study published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine found that CT scans cause roughly 29,000 cancers and 14,500 deaths every year in the US (http://www.naturalnews.com/028621_C...).

Poul Thorsen, the principal coordinator of multiple studies funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used to deny a vaccine/autism link was indicted on April 13th on 13 counts of fraud and 9 counts of money-laundering. The charges relate to funding for work he conducted for the CDC, which claimed to disprove associations between the mercury-based vaccine preservative, thimerosal, and increased rates of autism.

The TSA VIPR teams are designed to enhance security by working in mass transit, aviation, rail, maritime and other transportation modes alongside state and local law enforcement agencies during major events or as a random deterrent.

TSA has partnered with local law enforcement to conduct thousands of VIPR missions from coast to coast across the U.S.

Being a big fan of irony, I was amused to learn of the arrest of a Transportation Safety Administration screener caught stealing money right out of the wallets of Japanese tourists while they were being screened at the Kona airport. You’d think that the national agency whose main duty it is to screen people getting on airplanes to make sure they aren’t carrying bombs would be able to screen its own screeners to make sure they aren’t thieves.

Here’s what you should say, loud and clear, the next time a TSA agent wants to grope your child at an airport check in line; “See darling, this is the bad stranger we were telling you about. If any grownup tries to touch you like this person is doing, you will know that they are perverted. We can’t do anything because they have guns but you should look at this person and remember what a child molester looks like. This is why we do not want you to talk to strangers or get into a car with someone you don’t know. Remember this person’s face and all the faces of the rest of these people in uniforms here. They are child molesters.”

A passenger screener at Philadelphia International Airport is facing charges that he distributed more than 100 images of child pornography via Facebook, records show.

Federal agents also allege that Transportation Safety Administration Officer Thomas Gordon Jr. of Philadelphia, who routinely searched airline passengers, uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform.

Homeland Security agents arrested the TSA officer March 24, and he is being held without bail.

The heroes who risked their lives on 9/11 and have subsequently been denied health care, will now be considered possible terrorists under a provision in the 9/11 first responders health care bill.

That’s right, the “Administrator” and the head of DHS will make a decision whether or not the 9/11 heroes are terrorists. The fact that DHS is openly implementing a totalitarian police state apparently gives them the right to deem our heroes as possible terrorists.

This is an outright smack in the face to all the 9/11 first responders and possibly has something to do with the fact that first responders were among the first to question the official theory of 9/11.

Webmaster's Commentary:

So now, to literally add insult to injury, the DHS is going to punish first responders by denying them desperately needed health care by labeling them as "terrorists" because they question the orthodox account of 9/11?!?!?

This provision cannot be allowed to stand.Silencing these people by condemning them to death by denying desperately needed medical treatment is so very Old Soviet Union.

The 9/11 first responders are men and women of extraordinary courage who should be honored; not punished, no matter what they think about the events of 9/11, period, end of discussion.

(NaturalNews) In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations are essentially the same as people, and are thus free under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to participate in "electioneering communications," or political advertising and contribution campaigns. But lawmakers from the state of Vermont have put forth a resolution that, if passed, will amend the U.S. Constitution to state that only human beings are persons guaranteed constitutional protections.

The combination of rising gasoline prices and the steepest increase in the cost of food in a generation is threatening to push the US economy into a recession, according to Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners.

Of the six US recessions since 1970, all but the "9-11 year 2001 recession" have been linked to—of not triggered by—energy prices that crossed the 6 percent of personal consumption expenditures, he said. (During the shallow 2001 recession, energy prices had risen to about 5 percent of spending, which is higher than the long-term 4 percent share.)

What may make matters worse this time around, is there has been a steep increase in food prices that occurred as well. In other recent recessions food costs were benign, at between 7.5 percent and 7.8 percent of spending.

This year food prices have climbed 6.5 percent since the beginning of early January, according to Consumer Growth Partners.

"The combined increase in the necessities of food and energy creates a harsh double whammy for already stressed consumers," Johnson said. The last time this happened was in the recession that lasted from 1973 to 1975.

Johnson estimates that food and energy eat up about 15 percent of consumer spending at today's prices, compared with about 12.7 percent two years ago.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Memo to Craig Johnson: the US economy is in a depression, which most probably will be considered actually worse than the Great Depression of the 30s by future economic historians.

But the joblessness, the underemployment, and the ragged financial situation with which so many US citizens are suffering may well explode in the early summer into violence.

The US government has certainly been preparing for that eventuality.

Even though it was pulled, the Federal government issued, the following GPO request for hundreds of thousands of National Detainee Handbooks needed by 29 April 2011.

Corn rose from a two-week low and soybeans gained on speculation that wet, cold weather in the U.S. Midwest during the next two weeks will keep fields muddy, delaying planting and reducing crop yields.

Most of the Midwest got 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) of rain in the past three days with parts of the South getting 7.5 inches, according to Commodity Weather Group LLC. As much as 3.5 inches of moisture and below-normal temperatures by April 23 will slow planting from North Dakota to Mississippi, the forecaster said today in a report. Corn prices have doubled in the past year, while soybeans gained 36 percent.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This will have a nasty effect on food prices, already on the rise from inflation, a spike in gas costs, and poor crop yields in the US.

McDonald's Corp (NYSE:MCD - News) forecast higher prices for beef, dairy and other items and said it would cautiously raise prices to keep attracting diners, who are grappling with higher grocery and gas bills.

Shares fell 1.5 percent after the world's biggest hamburger chain said it planned to offset some, but not all, of its higher food costs, with small price increases throughout the year.

Self Sufficiency!A new generation of vegetable gardeners is transforming the urban environment and the way we are thinking about food.

They are planting on boulevards, digging garden plots in city parks, tearing the sod out of their back yards and even their front yards and filling their balconies with pots full of herbs and greens. It's the young, the urban, the cool. And the rest of us, too.

Forget diamonds and cash. Rapid inflation and the tanking US economy have birthed a whole new wave of organized crime involving food. The New York Times (NYT) reports that a group of highly-sophisticated scam artists recently pulled off a massive food heist involving eight tractor-trailer loads full of produce and meat, all worth roughly $300,000...

Note that the rise that's been going in since last fall has now been abruptly interrupted by the Libyan situation, and total oil production has fallen by about 0.5mbd. This is about 0.6% of global production, but given that the world economy has been growing rapidly and needing about another 0.5mbd/month, the shortfall over what would have happened in a counterfactual world with no Middle Eastern unrest is more like 1.2% of global production.In terms of the price production picture, this has put us much more into territory akin to the 2005-2008 oil shock:

Webmaster's Commentary:

Basically, OPEC set a trap for the United States and Obama walked right into it. And now decades of constant pandering to Israel are going to come back on us all with a vengeance. At the very least, Obama has to know now that he cannot invade Iran, no matter how hard Israel screams for it, because OPEC is demonstrating that they will not cover the resulting oil shortfall. The US needs the middle eastern oil to, well, conquer the middle east, and the OPEC nations have decided that this piecemeal war nonsense for Israel has gone on long enough. They dare not wait for Obama to get the replacement for the Deepwater Horizon well online and producing.

The US is weak, brought down by the corruption of the government, and hemorrhaging vast sums of money trying to buy its way out of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security scam. The Saudis realize that this is the opportune time to take revenge for the non-stop meddling and tinkering in Mideast affairs by the US, always for the benefit of Israel. They are shutting off that oil valve, and frankly, who can blame them? Payback for AIPAC is gonna be a BITCH!

The Us Government sold out the future of the country to please a foreign power. And now that the nation is a dried-out husk the parasites will discard us and seek a new host; Canada from all appearances.

As if a dollar in freefall was not enough, surging oil is about to hit the turbo boost, decimating what is left of the US (and global) consumer. Xinhua, via Energy Daily, brings this stunner: "Chinese oil giant Sinopec has stopped exporting oil products to maintain domestic supplies amid disruption concerns caused by Middle East unrest and Japan’s earthquake, a report said Wednesday. The state-run Xinhua news agency did not say how long the suspension would last but it reported that the firm had said it also would take steps to step up output “to maintain domestic market supplies of refined oil products”. Oh but don’t worry, those good Saudi folks are seeing a massive drop in demand… for their Kool aid perhaps. “Sinopec would ensure supplies met the “basic needs” of the southern Chinese special regions of Hong Kong and Macao, but they also should expect an unspecified drop in supply, Xinhua quoted an unnamed company official as saying.” Now… does anyone remember the 1970s?

The report said Sinopec has raised output of refined oil products this year, with its first-quarter production reaching 31.55 million tonnes, an increase of 6.2 percent from the same period last year.

The Beijing-based company attributed the result to China's rapid economic growth, robust oil demand and "the increase in the price of crude oil, oil products and petrochemical products."

It had said at the time that it would continue to "expand markets" in China and overseas this year, while intensifying its exploration efforts in the country's western regions.

Oil prices have surged on supply concerns as governments in the oil-rich Middle East and North Africa are hit by popular uprisings, while the Japan quake and resulting nuclear crisis led the country to seek other forms of energy other than atomic.

In case you missed it, earlier this week China announced that its foreign currency reserves are excessive and that they need to return to “reasonable” levels.

In politician speak, this is a clear, “we are sick of the US Dollar and will be taking steps to lower our holdings.” Remember, the US Dollar is China’s largest single holding. And China has already begun dumping Treasuries (US Debt).

This comes on the heels of China deciding (along with Russia) to trade in their own currencies, NOT the US Dollar. Not to mention the numerous warnings Chinese politicians have been issuing to the US over the last 24 months.

In simple terms, China is done playing nice and is now actively moving out of US Dollar denominated assets. This is the beginning of the US Dollar’s end as world reserve currency.

The dimwits in Washington don’t understand this because their advisors are all Wall Street stooges who don’t think debt or deficits matter. After all, why would they? Their entire business model is now based on endless cheap debt from the US Fed. So it’s only logically (in their minds) that the US as a sovereign state engage in the same strategies.

What does this mean? We’re on out own in terms of preparing for what’s coming. The US Dollar has already taken out its 2009 low in the overnight futures session. We now have only one line of support before the US Dollar breaks into the abyss (all time lows).

So if you’re not preparing for mega-inflation already, you need to start doing so NOW. The Fed WILL continue to pump money into the system 24/7 and it’s going to result in the death of the US Dollar.

History will eventually show that while nations with private central banks will often create wars for profit, absent those wars they cannot compete economically with nations that have avoided private central banking.

Something interesting appeared in the daily NYMEX report of its silver warehouse stockpile data: Canada's largest bullion depository (and one of five total) reclassified a whopping 5.2 million ounces of silver from Registered to Eligible status.

On the other hand, as those who follow the NYMEX data know too well, registered silver is actual physical Comex silver. Eligible on the other hand is sometimes called "someone else's silver" as it does not go through assays on exit/selling events. In other words, this is silver that can not be used to make delivery under a futures contract. As a result of this reclass, total registered silver dropped by 13% from 41.0 million ounces to 35.8 million. Assuming one does not have full faith in the simple error story, does this mean that deliverable silver just dropped by 13% overnight (this event occurred yesterday, but was reported as usual with a 24 hour delay)? And if so, is this effective transformation of physical to semi-paper silver indicative of what we may expect from other depositories in the next few days as the delivery notices start coming in?

The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion and is storing the bars in a New York vault, according to the fund’s board.

The holdings are worth about $987 million, based on yesterday’s closing price of $1,486 an ounce for Comex futures.

The decision to turn the fund’s investment into gold bars was influenced by Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the endowment’s board, Zimmerman said at its annual meeting on April 14. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime-mortgage collapse.

Gold advanced to a record for a third day as mounting inflation around the globe and Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis prompted investors to seek a store of value. Silver climbed to the highest price in 31 years.

Gold is approaching $1,500 an ounce this morning as it hits a new record, while silver surpasses $43, as fiscal pressures weigh on U.S. markets. The Dow has fallen almost 200 points in early trading . . . as Standard & Poor's downgrades U.S. outlook to negative ...

The increase in 2010 is almost entirely down to the United States, which accounted for $19.6 billion of the $20.6 billion real-terms increase. Excluding the U.S., the total in the ‘rest of the world’ barely changed in 2010, increasing by a statistically insignificant 0.1 per cent.

In a sign of the sluggish economy’s devastating impact, state government revenue across the country dropped by nearly one third in 2009 - the sharpest decline in 60 years, the Census Bureau said in a new report.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The government took your jobs so the banks could take your homes to cover the losses from the mortgage-backed securities frauds, and now they act surprised that tax revenues are down?

New data released by the IRS reveals that, over a period of 12 years, tax rates for the richest 400 Americans were effectively cut in half. In 1995, the richest 400 Americans paid, on average, 29.93% of their income in federal taxes. In 2007, the last year for which the IRS has released data, the richest 400 Americans paid just 16.63%.

What Happened at Fukushima Dai-Ichi?

The crippled reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Japan have a set of safety systems designed to provide cooling in case of an accident. Unfortunately, these systems weren’t able to prevent serious damage to the reactors and fuel following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

This Powerpoint slideshow Anatomy of a Tragedy: Fukushima Dai-Ichi shows in detail how the Fukushima reactors worked under normal conditions, and then describes how the events of March 11 led to the currently unfolding crisis.

This viral video is one of the most dramatic videos of the Japan Tsunami yet. Starts off slow but the absolute horror of the Tsunami wiping away the town is captured in full as the video progresses and citizens can be seen running for their lives.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan is expected to announce that the government will soon issue an order prohibiting people from entering within a 20-km radius of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, official sources said Wednesday.

Kan may announce the order when he visits Fukushima Prefecture possibly Thursday.

-Japan has set a new evacuation area outside the no-entry zone around the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan, its top government spokesman said Friday.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan instructed Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato and heads of municipalities concerned to have residents leave the new evacuation area by the end of May, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a press conference.

The new evacuation zone covers Iitate, Katsurao and Namie as well as parts of Minamisoma and Kawamata with the combined population of some 10,000 people. The zone is where cumulative radiation levels will likely top 20 millisieverts within a year after the nuclear crisis that erupted after the March 11 quake and tsunami. The government announced a plan on April 11 to create a new evacuation zone out of the 20-kilometer radius of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s <9501> Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.

It is the biggest default ever in Japan's History - it is worth 3.3 Billion. Morgan Stanley left their investors high and dry with this default! Will this information come to light in the U.S. MSM?

Portions from Article:

TOKYO (Reuters) – A Morgan Stanley property fund failed to make $3.3 billion in debt payments by a deadline on Friday, handing over the keys to a central Tokyo office building to Blackstone (BX.N) and other in

The $4.2 billion MSREF V real estate fund missed its April 15 deadline to repay 278 billion yen($3.3 billion) vestors, the largest repayment failure of its kind in Japan.

The refinanced debt was sold in six different tranches by Morgan Stanley to investors.Now comes the question on WHY Morgan Stanley did this?

Commonsense says they know something we do not or they can read the writing on the wall. Tokyo is getting a major amount of radiation from the Fukushima melt down. They have decided to walk away from their investments there.

I have read this morning (16th) that planes have been chartered with the elite getting out of Japan in a more hurried fashion than before.

Update -I have found information on the building they have walked away from.

From 1990 to 2005, General Electric spent more than $122 million on public relations, lobbying and legal efforts "to fight demands that it clean up three contaminated polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) sites," reports O'Dwyer's. The three sites are "a 200-mile stretch of the Hudson River (the nation's biggest Superfund site), Housatonic River (Pittsfield, MA) and a transformer facility (Rome, GA)." [2]

The government of Japan has issued an official order to telecommunications companies and web masters to censor reports which contradict the state media reports that the Fukushima nuclear radiation disaster is over.

The supposedly free democratic nation of Japan, which supposedly values and promotes freedom of speech, has officially issued orders to telecommunication companies and webmasters to remove content from websites that counter the official government position that the disaster is over and there is no more threat from the radiation.

The government charges that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send “letters of request” to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they “take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information. ”The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has apologized to the public over media reports about the long-term inhabitability of areas around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

An adviser to the Cabinet, Kenichi Matsumoto, at first told reporters on Wednesday that the Prime Minister remarked that areas around the nuclear plant will be inhabitable over a long period. He later retracted his comment and the Prime Minister himself also denied making such a statement.

Webmaster's Commentary:

So Kan says something approximately true, and is forced to retract his statement?!?

TEPCO President vows to step down for endangering public by failing to waterproof plant's backup generators

Yuhei Sato, the governor of Japan's tsunami-stricken Fukushima province, vowed this week that the damaged Fukushima Daiichi (Fukushima I) nuclear power plant would not be allowed to restart. Meanwhile the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) (9501) is facing serious questions and financial liability, for its role in only the second major nuclear power mishap in history.

The US Nuclear regulatory commission has reported that an "unusual event" has occurred after a Nuclear Power plant was hit by a tornado in Virginia causing it to lose power. It was the same loss of electricity that caused the Fukushima disaster leading to the meltdown of the reactors.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. must speed up plans to cover reactors at its crippled nuclear plant and drain tainted water to prevent more radiation leaks as Japan’s cyclone season approaches, engineering professors said.

In 2004, eight cyclones passed over or skirted Japan’s Tohoku region, where the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station is spewing radiation after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. The earliest was in May that year, according to Japan’s weather agency data. The eyes of two storms passed within 300 kilometers of Tohoku last year, the data show.

In order to stabilize the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, the government is planning to raise the radiation exposure limit for the workers from the current 250 milli-sievert/year.

The radiation exposure limit for workers at nuclear power plants is 100 milli-sievert/year, but the limit has been raised to 250 milli-sievert/year to deal with the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident. According to the government sources, the higher limit is being considered because it is getting increasingly difficult to have enough workers to work on the plant. Also, the radiation inside the Reactor buildings is high, and the annual limit of 250 milli-sieverts may not be high enough to achieve the goals laid out by the TEPCO road map.

The international standard allows 500 milli-sievert/year in an emergency work, but it hasn’t been decided how high the new limit will be. The government will carefully assess the timing of announcement, keeping in consideration the health concerns of the workers and the public opinion.

The work at the [Fukuhsima I] nuclear power plant requires skills and experience under harsh conditions, and securing workers has been a problem.

ex-skf.blogspot.com brought this story to our attention. The Japanese author makes a good point about the increase in radiation levels.

If I remember right, 500 milli-sievert/year is for an emergency work that lasts for a few days to a few weeks, and not for a few months to a year or more. Same thing for raising the radiation exposure limit for non-nuclear plant workers for an emergency; that emergency is not supposed to last for more than few weeks.

I also hear that the government is planning to raise the annual radiation exposure limit for pregnant women. Instead of evacuating the expecting mothers to safer, lower-radiation places, the government simply raises the exposure limit and tell them it’s safe, don’t worry. What a country.

A highly radioactive block of cement capable of killing anyone who spends more than 6 hours near it has been found outside the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Debris with similar radiation is believed to be spread around the nuclear power plant. Similar highly radioactive debris is spread around the nuclear power plant and may delay the 9 month time line to stop the radiation leak.

TEPCO: Highly radioactive concrete fragment found

The operator of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says that concrete debris emitting a high level of radiation has been found near the Number 3 reactor.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, says its workers detected radioactivity of 900 millisieverts per hour being emitted from a 30-by-30 centimeter concrete fragment, 5 centimeters thick, on Wednesday.

The workers were using heavy equipment to remove rubble near the electrical switchyard.

TEPCO says the workers were exposed to 3.17 millisieverts of radiation during the clean-up and the concrete block has been stored safely in a container with other debris.

The utility believes the contaminated fragment could be part of debris scattered across the compound as a result of a hydrogen explosion at the Number 3 reactor.

In order to stabilize the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, the government is planning to raise the radiation exposure limit for the workers from the current 250 milli-sievert/year.

The radiation exposure limit for workers at nuclear power plants is 100 milli-sievert/year, but the limit has been raised to 250 milli-sievert/year to deal with the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident. According to the government sources, the higher limit is being considered because it is getting increasingly difficult to have enough workers to work on the plant. Also, the radiation inside the Reactor buildings is high, and the annual limit of 250 milli-sieverts may not be high enough to achieve the goals laid out by the TEPCO road map.

Tokyo Electric Power Company says radioactive substances that leaked into the sea at the damaged Fukushima plant over six days from April 1st are estimated at 4,700 terabecquerels. This is 20,000 times more than the annual allowable limit at the complex.

The head of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, Takashi Sawada, said yesterday that fuel rods in reactors 1 and 3 have melted and settled at the bottom of their containment vessels, confirming fears that the plant suffered a partial meltdown after last month’s huge earthquake and tsunami.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This is in addition to reactor 2, which was reported weeks ago to have burned through the pressure vessel and the containment, leaving puddles of radioactive debris on the concrete floor of the drywell.

Tokyo, April 18 (Jiji Press)--The industry ministry's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency on Monday acknowledged that nuclear fuel rods have melted at the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors of the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan. The agency reported the assessment to the day's meeting of the government's Nuclear Safety Commission. This was the agency's first official recognition of core melt accidents at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s <9501> Fukushima No. 1 plant, which was knocked out by the March 11 massive earthquake and tsunami. On March 12, officials of the nuclear agency noted that nuclear fuel may have melted at the No. 1 reactor, where radioactive cesium was found. According to the agency, such radioactive materials as technetium-99m were detected in the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors. Technetium cannot be released unless fuel pellets in nuclear fuel rods melt, the agency said.

… Japanese regulators NISA and MEXT seem oblivious of the mysterious fact that I-131 Bq “reactor density” is still often reported double the Cs-134/137 Bq. The TEPCO data suggest that fission is ongoing despite the reactor shutdowns. This is bad news. …

Everyone with just a very basic understanding of reactor safety should know that once a reactor is scrammed, U-235 is no longer fissioning, and I-131 has no parent which can be decaying to create it in an ongoing process… the water circulating in intact SNF pools should have absolutely no detectable I-131 in them. …

[I]t has been almost five full 8-day halflives for their I-131 to decay to stable xenon. At t=0, as we say, the Bq of I-131 and Cs-134 and Cs-137 would all be approximately equal, but, after five I-131 halflives, the “reactor density” radioactivity of I-131 should be only 1/2**5=~3% of what it was originally. Go look at all the data of relative radioactivity that TEPCO is reporting with dates of April 19, 2011 and you’ll see that instead of I-131 being below the levels of the two cesiums, I-131 is often twice as high as the two cesiums always reported.

The fact that nobody in Japan seems to know basics of reactor accident progression that I learned at Sandia Labs in early 1980s is truly scary, because it suggests they are playing with these broken/leaking reactors and SNF pools inside at least three buildings totally destroyed by steam explosions … as if the reactors and their SNF pools are broken toys that they’re using trial and error to try fixing.

… Monday night, Tepco said it detected high radioactivity coming from the spent fuel pool of the No. 2 unit, indicating that either the fuel rods in the pool were damaged or steam containing radioactive materials that rose from the reactor dissolved in the pool water.

Some 160,000 becquerels per cubic cm of cesium-134, 150,000 becquerels of cesium-137 and 4,100 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131 were detected in a water sample extracted from the storing pool on Saturday.

Gundersen analyzes new pressure and temperature data from the Fukushima reactors and containments. TEPCO recently denied that the fuel pool in Unit 4 was experiencing a partial inadvertent criticality, despite the finding of radioactive iodine-131 (an isotope with an eight-day half-life). The utility blamed the iodine on deposition resulting from the explosion of the other buildings. Gundersen takes an in-depth look at TEPCO's Theory. Lastly, he discusses the FDA decision not to monitor fish for radioactivity.

Quote: "I don't know how a gas falls from the sky in these kind of quantities..."

… Monday night, Tepco said it detected high radioactivity coming from the spent fuel pool of the No. 2 unit, indicating that either the fuel rods in the pool were damaged or steam containing radioactive materials that rose from the reactor dissolved in the pool water.

Some 160,000 becquerels per cubic cm of cesium-134, 150,000 becquerels of cesium-137 and 4,100 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131 were detected in a water sample extracted from the storing pool on Saturday.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday that spent nuclear fuel rods at the No. 2 reactor at its crippled nuclear power plant may be damaged although damage levels have yet to be known.

The company said its examination of water in a tank connected to the spent fuel pool of the reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, ravaged by the March 11 quake and tsunami, found 4,100 becquerels of radioactive iodine per cubic centimeter and 4,000 to 160,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium.

The radioactive cesium levels are extremely high, company official Junichi Matsumoto said. The company believes the levels, compared with data on leaks from the reactor vessel, indicate that spent fuel rods have been exposed and damaged. The spent fuel pool contains 615 fuel assemblies.

However, the industry ministry’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency believes the detected radioactive materials are likely to have leaked from the reactor vessel.

The agency explained that it is implausible to associate the high concentration of iodine-131, whose half-life is short, with spent nuclear fuel rods, which are stored for a long time.

… Monday night, Tepco said it detected high radioactivity coming from the spent fuel pool of the No. 2 unit, indicating that either the fuel rods in the pool were damaged or steam containing radioactive materials that rose from the reactor dissolved in the pool water.

Some 160,000 becquerels per cubic cm of cesium-134, 150,000 becquerels of cesium-137 and 4,100 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131 were detected in a water sample extracted from the storing pool on Saturday.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday that spent nuclear fuel rods at the No. 2 reactor at its crippled nuclear power plant may be damaged although damage levels have yet to be known.

The company said its examination of water in a tank connected to the spent fuel pool of the reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, ravaged by the March 11 quake and tsunami, found 4,100 becquerels of radioactive iodine per cubic centimeter and 4,000 to 160,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium.

The radioactive cesium levels are extremely high, company official Junichi Matsumoto said. The company believes the levels, compared with data on leaks from the reactor vessel, indicate that spent fuel rods have been exposed and damaged. The spent fuel pool contains 615 fuel assemblies.

However, the industry ministry’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency believes the detected radioactive materials are likely to have leaked from the reactor vessel.

The agency explained that it is implausible to associate the high concentration of iodine-131, whose half-life is short, with spent nuclear fuel rods, which are stored for a long time.

“A sample of water taken Tuesday [from No. 4′s spent fuel pool] contained 220 becquerels of iodine-131 per cubic centimeter. That compares with a level of just 0.01 becquerels or less for normal spent fuel pools.” -Wall Street Journal, April 14

“The company said a newly analysis indicated the damage to some fuel rods in the No. 4 unit’s spent nuclear fuel pool, as it detected higher levels of radioactive iodine-131, cesium-134 and cesium-137 than normal. Radioactive iodine-131 amounting to 220 becquerels per cubic centimeter, cesium-134 of 88 becquerels and cesium-137 of 93 becquerels were detected in the No. 4 unit’s spent nuclear fuel pool water, according to the TEPCO. Those Radioactive materials are generated by nuclear fission.” – International Business Times, April 14

… In the No. 3 reactor building, the robots detected a radiation level between 28 to 57 millisieverts per hour on the ground floor, while that of the reactor 1 building was between 10 to 49 millisieverts per hour. …

NSC 23, the Cabinet Office, the amount of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station TEPCO, even at five days this month settled emissions, Terra 154 becquerels per day (One terabyte is 1 trillion) announced that it had reached. [...]

Fukushima I Nuke Plant: 154 Terabecquerels Per Day, Every Day of radioactive iodine and cesium still spewing out of the plant, Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission now admits.

[...] From Yomiuri Shinbun (9:15PM JST 4/23/2011):

The Nuclear Safety Commission under the Prime Minister’s Office disclosed on April 23 that the amount of radioactive materials being released from the TEPCO Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant was 154 terabecquerels per day (1 tera is 1 trillion) as late as April 5 when the amount being released was considered stabilized.

On April 5, the estimated amount of radioactive materials released from Fukushima I Nuke Plant was 0.69 terabecquerels/hour for iodine-131 and 0.14 terabecquerels/hour for cesium-137. When the numbers were recalculated according to the INES method (converting cesium amount into iodine equivalent), the amount released turned out to be 6.4 terabecquerels/hour (which was 154 terabecquerels per day. Previously, the Nuclear Safety Commission had simply added the numbers for iodine-131 and cesium-137, and announced it was less than 1 terrabecquerel per hour [CORRECTED FROM 1 PER DAY].

CORRECTED by EX-SKF: “The previous estimate was 1 terabequerel per hour, not per day. So, per day would be 24 terabequerels.”

[...] Haruki Madarame, chairman of the government commission, said it has estimated that the release of 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour lasted for several hours and that has since lowered to under 1 terabecquerel per hour, Kyodo reported. [...]

From this display of data (there is an English translation button at top), we see that Reactor 1 is holding between 4 and 9 atmospheres of pressure. This indicates the reactor pressure vessel is intact, or that any leakage is minor.

The same cannot be said for Reactors 2 and 3, which show no internal pressure at all. This tells us the reactor pressure vessels have indeed been breached. Reactor 4 was already shut down when the quake struck, so no readings are present, and reactors 5 and 6 did shut down properly when the quake struck, so the no pressure reading is correct.

Important side note. In reading the official instruction manual for these GE reactors, I note that the control rod assemblies are inserted into the reactor core from underneath, not the top. So any core meltdown and collection of debris at the bottom of the pressure vessel will disable the control rods.

Separately, readings from a water tank attached to the spent fuel pool in Unit 2 showed a severe spike in radiation that NISA officials said might have been caused by the escape of radioactive vapor from a nearby containment vessel. They said, however, the possibility of damage to spent fuel rods could not be ruled out. …

At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, high levels of radiation have kept workers from approaching the buildings housing the first 3 reactors, which lost their cooling functions in the March 11th earthquake and tsunami.

On Friday, the highest radiation level measured outside the double-entry doors of the Number 1 to 3 reactor buildings was 2 to 4 millisieverts per hour.

Radiation levels measured between the double doors of those reactor buildings was 270 millisieverts in the Number One reactor, 12 in Number 2, and 10 in Number 3.The radiation level detected at the Number One reactor exceeds the national exposure limit of 250 millisieverts for nuclear contract workers.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO, has started using a remote-controlled robot inside the reactor buildings.

But issues remain as radioactive water has been found in turbine buildings and the utility tunnel outside the reactors.

At the Number 2 reactor, the level of highly contaminated water in the tunnel is still rising. To prevent overflow, TEPCO is stepping up the inspection of the nuclear waste processing facility, to which it aims to transfer contaminated water.

Underground water at the plant is also contaminated.On Wednesday, the level of radioactive substances sharply increased at facilities where underground water from the Number 1 and 2 reactors is collected.

On Friday, workers kept on monitoring the situation.They say the level of radioactive substances has stabilized or decreased in every reactor from 1 to 6.

So they say it's unlikely that highly radioactive water is still seeping into underground water.

A pair of thin robots on treads sent to explore buildings inside Japan's crippled nuclear reactor came back Monday with disheartening news: Radiation levels are far too high for repair crews to go inside.

Nevertheless, officials remained hopeful they can stick to their freshly minted "roadmap" for cleaning up the radiation leak and stabilizing the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant by year's end so they can begin returning tens of thousands of evacuees to their homes.

Specialist on Japan, the sociologist Paul Jobin [1] has studied workplace conditions for workers in the nuclear industry. He offers us his analysis at a moment when those workers are attempting to get a hold on the situation at the Japanese power plant

Beneath the reactor building of Unit 4 of Nuclear Power Plants Fukushima Daiichi TEPCO has confirmed that water has accumulated at 5 meters depth, TEPCO, and the amount of radiation, whether to have flowed from where the water I decided to look like.According to TEPCO, I was in the basement to check the status of the Unit 4 reactor building of the 14th, I have found that water has accumulated a depth of 5 meters.The No. 4 is found that water has accumulated near the stairs down to the ground on October 31, from surface to 100 mSv of radiation has been detected at a higher per hour.[warning: google translator messes up dates; i = it]

Just as the BP oil spill one year ago heaped scrutiny on the United State's Minerals Management Service, harshly criticized for lax drilling oversight and cozy ties with the oil industry, the nuclear crisis in Japan is shining a light on that nation's safety practices.

***

[Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev, who as director of the Soviet Spetsatom clean-up agency helped in the efforts 25 years ago to clean up Chernobyl ] has also accused the IAEA of being too close with corporations. "This is only a fake organization because every organization which depends on the nuclear industry – and the IAEA depends on the nuclear industry – cannot perform properly."

The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan has released only two computer-simulated estimates of radioactive substance dispersal since the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, although more than 2,000 of them were made, sources familiar with the matter said Monday.

TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501) President Masataka Shimizu said Monday the company is cancelling a plan to build two new reactors at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant in northeastern Japan.

This is the first time since the massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi complex that the company has acknowledged it will permanently abandon its plan to build the reactors.

Shimizu said in testimony before Parliament Monday that it would be hard to justify going ahead with the plan to add the two reactors at the earthquake- and tsunami-stricken power plant. He said Tepco will submit a new plan, without the new units, to the government soon. Tepco had planned to build the No. 7 and No. 8 reactors at the plant, with commercial operations slated in 2016 and 2017.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the company at the center of Japan’s nuclear disaster, failed to get an assurance from Fukushima prefecture’s governor that a second plant in the area can be restarted.Tokyo Electric President Masataka Shimizu met Governor Yuhei Sato in the prefectural office in Fukushima city earlier today to apologize for the accident, said Katsuhiro Kiko, a spokesman at the local government. Shimizu, who was refused meetings with the governor on April 11 and March 22, outlined plans to bring the crisis under control.Sato told reporters after the meeting that Tepco can’t restart nuclear power plants without safety guarantees, according to Kiko.

The central government today started enforcing a no-entry zone within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of Dai-Ichi as a public health measure after residents returned to the area to check their homes. Dai-Ichi is located about 220 kilometers north of Tokyo. Tepco’s Fukushima Dai-Ni plant is about 11 kilometers south of the Dai-Ichi plant.

The FDA claims there is no need to test Pacific fish for Japan nuclear radiation reports the Anchorage Daily News but when drilled on details by the reporter refuse to answer questions and give the reported the run around. The FDA says there will be no testing of fish until NOAA testing finds cause for alarm but NOAA refuses to answer questions on what kind of monitoring has been done.

As previously I previously reported Japan has reported record levels of radiation in the Pacific Ocean.

NHK also reports that the radioactive material is expected to be carried East Toward the US in a fast-moving ocean current.

“Due to the amounts of radioactive material falling below detection levels, monitoring data will not be collected several times a week as before. Data postings will appear less frequently unless conditions warrant more frequent measurements.” – AZ.gov

He says the Mossad was involved but that it had to have been made in the US. The US is Israel. The same faction runs both places. The Mossad was just a delivery service. They didn't attack Japan. This was accidental. 60% of Israel's economy is in security and the US cyber security on phones systems and computers etc is so overlapped with Israel that one can't tell where one stops and the other starts. What it does is like he said, attack in a generic way, it does not attack the actual plant's fuel rods or fission processes etc what it does is attack more basic things like the systems that communicated to automated functions like PLCs that control water levels and things like that. You'd be unaware that you had the worm until you needed to use those.

The United States and Israel are behind the computer worm Stuxnet designed to hurt Iran's controversial nuclear programme, state news agency IRNA reported Saturday quoting a military officer.

"Investigations and studies show that the source of Stuxnet originates from America and the Zionist regime," the commander of the Iranian civil defence organisation, Gholam Reza Jalali, said.

Jalali was the first Iranian official to accuse Tehran's two arch-foes over the Stuxnet virus. German computer experts and some Western media reports had indicated that the United States and Israel were behind it.

Stuxnet was publically identified last June and it reportedly mutated and wreaked havoc on computerised industrial equipment in Iran in the following months.

The worm was reportedly targeting Bushehr nuclear power plant, where several technical problems have been blamed for delays in getting the facility fully operational.

Jalali said once the worm mounts on a system, it begins to gather information and then sends reports from the infected machines to designated Internet addresses.

"After following up the reports that were sent, it became clear that the final destinations (of these reports) were the Zionist regime and the American state of Texas," he was quoted as saying by IRNA.

Webmaster's Commentary:

The real question is that since the reactors at Fukushima used the same Siemens' controllers Stuxnet attacks, and since Stuxnet was known to be loose in Japan near Fukushima last November, and given that three of the 6 reactors did not properly shut down as they were designed to do when the quake struck because their controllers did not operate properly, did Israel and the United States, in their blind hate against Iran, unleash a nuclear hell on Earth for us all?

Stuxnet 'virus,' a cyberweapon aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities, could be redirected to launch a broad attack on US basic services, such as water and power supplies, says a report to Congress.

Webmaster's Commentary:

It does not need to be altered. Any facility that uses Siemens' controllers is vulnerable to the worm, which was developed by Israel and the US to go after Iran;'s nuclear power station, but escaped into the "wild", and was known to be infecting computers near the Fukushima power station (which does use Siemens' controllers) last November. This may explain why the reactors did not shut down as planned when the quake struck.

A nuclear reactor at Plant Vogtle in eastern Georgia has been taken out of service until authorities determine why it unexpectedly shut down. …

Nuclear reactors are designed to shut down if automatic monitoring systems detect conditions that could be unsafe. Southern Co. spokesman Alyson Fuqua said it was not immediately clear what prompted the shutdown. …

According to Siemens’ website, EDF Energy is a customer of the German technology giant, whose infrastructure software has suffered from a global infection of the sophisticated Stuxnet worm. A 2007 briefing deck by the Technical Working Group on Nuclear Power Plant Control and Instrumentation disclosed that Heysham 2 had its Reypac controllers replaced with Siemens S7. Today’s outage occurred at Heysham 1 and so far I cannot determine if Heysham 1 had the same upgrades as Heysham 2. EDF Energy hasn’t disclosed any further information about the outage at the time of this writing.

SEOUL AP South Korean nuclear power plant operators, "Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power" on the 19th, said the No. 4 nuclear power plant in Kori in the southern city of Busan, and it had problems over the break about 1 ½ hours of external power supply revealed.To provide power to run the emergency diesel generators, No. 4 continued to operate. Safety problems of nuclear power, two workers suffered minor burns due to an electric shock.The nuclear power plant in 12 days, just to stop the troubles of the circuit breaker failure driving the No. 1 power supply system.

Radiation detectors are finding their way into stores as public concern grows over potential radioactive food contamination. Hanaro Club run by Nonghyup or the National Agricultural Cooperative Foundation placed detectors in 32 stores nationwide, following the footsteps of other large discount store chain such as Lotte Mart. Hanaro Club began testing on agricultural, livestock and seafood products last Thursday.

is reporting that New York City wants to require "licenses" for any detector for nuclear, biological, or chemical detectors. We know how "permitting" devices works in Chicago--they never banned handguns in the city, they simply stopped issuing permits for them.

Webmaster's Commentary:

We are already seeing propaganda pieces claiming that citizens' detectors are not reliable and how we should all put our trust in the official figures for radiation release. I wonder if in their struggle to save the Pacific Commercial Fishing Industry if the US Government will consider banning radiation detectors in the hands of private citizens. Use a scintillometer, go to jail?

Japanese officials have been forced to explain why it took them a month to disclose large-scale releases of radioactive material in mid-March at a crippled nuclear-power plant. The government announced [on April 12] that it had raised its rating of the severity of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex to 7, the worst on an international scale, from 5. Japan's new assessment was based largely on computer models showing heavy emissions of radioactive iodine and cesium March 14-16, soon after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami rendered the plant's emergency cooling system inoperative. The nearly monthlong delay in acknowledging the extent of these emissions is a fresh example of confused data and analysis from the Japanese and put authorities on the defensive about whether they have delayed or blocked the release of information to avoid alarming the public. Seiji Shiroya, a commissioner of Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission, an independent panel that oversees the country's nuclear industry, ... suggested a public-policy reason for having kept quiet. "Some foreigners fled the country even when there appeared to be little risk," he said. "If we immediately decided to label the situation as Level 7, we could have triggered a panicked reaction." The peak release in emissions of radioactive particles took place after hydrogen explosions at three Fukujima reactors.

The medical Gestapo was recently spotted working in Japan getting the police to charge two people with the selling of zeolite. The substance, sold as “Premium Zeolite,” was billed as absorbing radioactive substances and allowing the body to excrete them within six hours. The two were charged with selling medicine without a license. A month later we hear that they are using tons of zeolite at the nuclear plant to control radiation. What gives?

The operator of the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima has begun dropping sandbags filled with an absorbent into the Pacific Ocean to try to reduce the danger from radiation. The bags are filled with zeolite, better known as the active material sprinkled in cat litter boxes to absorb odors. In this case, zeolite is meant to take up caesium that has been detected at high levels along the Fukushima coast.

Dr. Garry Gordon (who knows much more about detoxification and chelation than most other doctors and certainly more than medical officials who still see no need for heavy metal testing or treatment) has a lot to say about zeolite for detoxification and radioprotection:

"What is zeolite? Zeolite is a volcanic-derived mineral with porous structure, which allows some molecules to pass through and causes others to be either excluded or broken down. The term has been derived from Greek words “zein” and “boil,” which mean “a stone” and “to boil.” This term was originally coined by Axel Fredrick Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist in the 18th century. He observed that upon heating a natural mineral rapidly, the stones began to dance about as the water evaporated.

Zeolites are incredibly well suited for heavy metal detoxification and are considered 100 percent safe and non-toxic by the FDA. Zeolite has an “open” structure that can accommodate a wide variety of positive ions, like Na+, K+, Ca2+, Mg2+ and others. Basically, the molecular structure of zeolite resembles a honeycomb, with many negatively-charged chambers"

Since heavy metals and other pollutants, including radioactive ions, have a positive charge, the zeolite will attract those positively-charged toxic molecules like a magnet. The toxins are “caged” within the zeolite structure, and then safely excreted from the body. In Chapter 24 of the Handbook of Zeolite Science and Technology, entitled “Medical Applications of Zeolites,” it states:

Many researchers have demonstrated the ability of several natural zeolites to take up certain radionuclides (e.g., 90Sr, 137Cs, 60Co, 45Ca, and 51Cr).

There have been two spillages of radioactive waste and a breakdown in an emergency cooling system at Britain’s nuclear plants in the past three months, according to a report to ministers leaked to the Guardian.

A brown puddle containing plutonium five times the legal safety limit leaked from an old ventilation duct at the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria. This exposed “a number of shortfalls in the design”, says the report.

All three incidents occurred in February this year and are still under investigation by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), the government’s newly created nuclear safety watchdog. They were sufficiently serious to be reported to ministers under safety guidelines agreed in the wake of the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine 25 years ago.

My Disclaimer:

I present this information in my capacity as a human being, under Common Law, exercising my fundamental God given rights and freedoms. This information represents my private thoughts and beliefs and has been compiled and expressed for educational purposes only. In no way should it be construed as either legal or financial advice. If anyone feels a need to determine the accuracy of this information and the effectiveness of apply any of it, I strongly recommend consulting a competent expert on this subject matter.

Here's a Clue:Look the one place "They" never talk about.Look to your heart, as your competent expert lies within."Seek and you shall find."